Think bigger.

A couple of weeks ago, my best frenemy said to me, “You know, is it really still ‘Sarah’s Big Idea’? It seems like you only ever do little stuff now.”

Frenemies are the worst. You can spend months or even years unconsciously tuning out everything they say, and then one day, BAM! A single sentence suddenly penetrates your frenemy fog and you are like, well, damn. He is right. I am a pathetic shell of my former glorious self.

You know what it is? I don’t give two shits about the woodwork.

There, I said it.

I don’t give two shits about the woodwork, but now that it has begun, I am trapped. We are talking about putting our house on the market, and I have been expressly forbidden by both Chris and our realtor not to do any of the projects that I want to do.

You know what that means? It means I can’t do anything interesting. I’ve been put in creative jail.

Painting the woodwork had to be done in order to hide obvious flaws from potential buyers. It is a little idea. It is a very nit-picky, time-consuming, non-photogenic idea, but it is little. I hate everything about this project, possibly including the fact that I am painting 113-year-old-woodwork. Yeah. Maybe I never really came to grips with that.

And yet, here we are. In the process of sanding that first coat of primer.

It’s slow, and it’s messy, and it’s frustrating…and it’s necessary to ensure that the final product doesn’t look like someone carelessly slapped some paint on without caring. It’s also killing me, because it makes it look like this god-awful project is actually moving backwards.

So you know what? I’m not going to sand anymore. If it ends up looking like I carelessly slapped some paint on without caring, well, that’ll be because I don’t care. I’ve tried to make myself care, but I don’t. So for my sanity, and yours, and for the sake of this blog which is desperately in need of ideas bigger than this one, I’m going to carelessly slap some paint on without caring.

Somehow, I think that my standards for “good enough” are going to be waaaaay higher than a potential buyer’s. If bumpy woodwork scares them off, then they probably weren’t the best owners for a house like this, anyway.

So, in like, a week or two, I’ll have some paint carelessly slapped on the woodwork, and we can put this whole woodwork business behind us. And then we can talk about painting the walls. And de-popcorning the ceiling. And we can discuss window treatments. And the ceiling fan from 1985. And the fireplace surround.